Robert Kenyon, the Reform UK candidate for Makerfield, wants the electorate to see him as the “local lad” — a plumber and councillor who hears the voices of a constituency he claims has been ignored for forty years. But in the lead-up to the by-election where Andy Burnham seeks to pave his way back to Westminster, the candidate’s own reflection is being obscured by the very history he asks us to look past. Confronted with online posts — a thumbs-up emoji and a supportive comment on a sexually graphic post about Carol Vorderman, among other “crass” relics — Kenyon dismissed them as jokes from a time before he entered public life, then immediately pivoted to indict Labour’s stance on gender identity as “a bit more dangerous than a few 10-year-old tweets.”
The move is textbook. It is the tactical trivialization of the digital footprint, a maneuver that posits a clean break between the private man — whose crude sentiments are supposedly benign — and the public representative, who is suddenly endowed with a “duty to behave.” But Kenyon’s reaction reveals more than the posts ever could: he labels his own words “crass,” as if that word carries the weight of contrition, then folds his moral failure into a broader cultural grievance. The individual’s lapse is repositioned as a secondary concern compared to the perceived apostasies of an opponent. This is the classic displacement tactic, a performance that empties the apology of meaning while preserving the underlying temperament.
And it is not unique to Kenyon. This pattern runs through the apparatus of populist political movements — Reform UK, the American Christian nationalist wing, and their Evangelical-adjacent allies. The framework regularly hollows out legitimate policy debate to serve as a shield for personal conduct that the movement itself theoretically purports to despise. The logic demands that the external enemy be prioritized so completely that the electorate never pauses to ask whether the man in the mirror is actually an improvement. Reform UK’s own handling of Kenyon’s record — the decision not to investigate, the signal that only the candidate’s utility in the culture war matters — teaches voters a singular lesson: crassness is not a disqualifier; it is the authentication of authenticity. The “local lad” who talks like a lout online is recast as the genuine article, while decency is painted as the polished professional’s artifice. In the end, the crassness isn’t a regrettable remnant of youth; it is the feature, not the bug.
We know the outcome of this trade. When a movement decides to prioritize ideological utility over character, it doesn’t get a representative who is truly in tune with the people; it gets a mirror — a candidate who reflects back the coarseness the movement cultivates, and then insists that vulgarity is somehow more honest than virtue. The Prophet Micah reminds us that the Lord requires us “to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” (Micah 6:8). Humility is not a public-relations posture adopted after a newspaper unearths your forum history. Humility is the hard, quiet work of owning one’s own limitations and the wreckage of one’s own past before asking others to invest their future in you. And as the Apostle Paul wrote to the Colossians, “Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices” (Colossians 3:9). The “old self” is not shed the moment one is elected to the council or the Commons. It is carried into the polling booth, the parish, and the parliament alike — unless one does the unglamorous labor of actually reckoning with it.
Makerfield does not need a contest over who is better at outrunning their own historical baggage. It demands a decisive choice between rival visions for a substantive future, delivered by representatives who have done the hard work of naming and repenting of their past rather than deflecting it. The crassness isn’t a footnote to be managed; it is the measure of the man. And a man who cannot hold his own history in the light without redirecting the beam onto his enemies is no servant of the people — he is merely the sharpest edge of the mirror, reflecting back everything the movement has become.